JDK 1.1 Performance Enhancements

Interpreter Loop in Assembly Code on Win32 and Solaris/SPARC Since portions of the Java VM have been rewritten in assembly
language, the resulting VM now runs up to five times faster on certain
operations.

Non-Continuous Heap Support for Mac
Improved memory usage on Macintosh computers enables Java to run
more smoothly with other applications.

Monitor Speedups
Synchronized methods enable operations to run more quickly and
efficiently.

AWT Peer Class Re-Write for Win32
To achieve higher performance, AWT peer native classes have been
completely rewritten to be hosted running on top of Win32.

JAR (Java Archive) bundling of resources for a single HTTP transaction
JAR is a new JDK 1.1 platform-independent file format that
aggregates many files into one. Java applets and their requisite
components--such as class files, images and sounds--can be bundled into a
compressed JAR file and downloaded to a browser in a single HTTP
transaction to reduce download time. In addition, applet authors can
digitally sign individual entries in a JAR file to authenticate their
origin.